Antioxidants – all hype?
I am getting caught up in the whole ORAC measurements and antioxidant’s anti-aging power. I am drinking more green tea and eating more cranberries and goji berries, and daily vitamin E supplements. I feel good about my better dieting but can’t help but think if antioxidants are all hype. What makes one antioxidant different from others? For instance, if vitamin C is an antioxidant, why can’t I just drink more Hi-C (ignoring the high sugar content) to get my antioxidants? Should I just ignore claims from foods that say antioxidants are super cool and just focus more on other aspects of the food???
Tagged with: antioxidant • antioxidants • cranberries • goji berries • green tea • hype • measurements • orac • sugar content • supplements • vitamin c • vitamin e
Filed under: Anti Aging Diet
Science has shown that there are food molecules that protect us from oxidative stress on the cellular and molecular level. For example, The National Cancer Institute is studying phytochemicals, Phyto is the Greek word for plant or light.
Its important to know that phytochemicals are the pigment that form on fruits and vegetables to protect the seeds from the Ultra Violet damaging rays of our Sun.
We eat those phytochemicals and they do what anitoxidant vitamins and minerals cannot do, they move through the cell wall and enter the cell. They then snuff out free radicals by allowing the atom to borrow an ion so that the cell will not rust or prematurely age, thereby keeping cancerous cells from forming or metastasizing (a cell finding a new home to grow).
Rust is a great example of free radical damage. That is what aging is, its your cells rusting. Antioxidants help reduce that rust or premature aging.
Anyway, the National Cancer Institute launched a multi million dollar study to understand these new found food components to understand why they work and how they work.
You can drink all the commercially available green tea you want to, but it has oxidized by the time you, the consumer thinks you are getting any nutritional value. But, you are not.
Green tea that is carefully extracted and kept from oxidizing is expensive and is the kind that works.
For example, many products tested through ORAC are pro oxidative. Meaning, they are harmful. So, there is an exact science to discovering how high quality food molecules actually work within the human cell.
See resource link on ORAC (o).
By the way, High C is absolute junk. Its corn syrup and synthetic vitamin C added with a health claim. Eat a naval orange and you will get natural vitamin C that is in its actual food matrix that your body will utilize and nourish your cells.
If you looked into the orange with a high powered microscope, the center of a food matrix vitamin c is copper and the outer edges are the bioflavinoids that bind vitamin C as one component. All work in concert and all are needed for the cell to function properly… High C cannot provide what a naval orange can.
You need a balanced diet…antioxicants can found in numerous sources, but that doesn’t mean you eat them all in a day, it means you mix them up
Antioxidants are VERY healthy, and you about can’t get too many of them. Though it’s always good to have balance in your diet, foods rich in antioxidants have all sorts of health benifits.
Antioxidants attack and bind to substances in the blood and body called free radicals. Free radicals are molecules that can easily convert to other substances, including cancer and other diseases. They also reduce the immune system’s effectiveness. So, the more antioxidants in your diet the healthier you’ll be all around, and the chances of sickness and disease is greatly reduced.
You should definitely learn about the health benifits of other foods as well, but don’t ignore the antioxidants either.
Having lived through many food fads in my long lifetime I tend to take them with a grain of salt. What is really powerful dietary information today will be proved wrong in a couple of years. Like most things look at who benefits from this fad.
My philosophy about food is to eat sparingly of a great variety of foods. That kind of diet should provide all of the things you need.
You are doing the right thing by taking fruits with high antioxidant levels. But if you would like to make things simpler there is a supplement called Isotonix OPC-3 that is now getting the title as the world’s most powerful antioxidant. It is a natural supplement containing grape seed extract, and red wine extract, and another powerful antioxidant called Pycnogenol which is a natural plant extract from the bark of the maritime pine tree which grows exclusively along the coast of southwest France. All three antioxidants are put into one supplement hence the name OPC-3. The supplement is in isotonic form so you receive superior delivery and absorption in your body. Isotonix OPC-3 can be found at
http://www.marketamerica.com/blittrean/index.cfm?action=shopping.wpProductNoShop&prodID=13009
Two other excellent sources of antioxidants are:
Isotonix ORAC
http://www.marketamerica.com/blittrean/index.cfm?action=shopping.uoProduct&storeID=8&prodID=13039
And a supplement I use that is great for energy, working out, overall health, and antioxidants is called Isotonix Acai Acaihttps://www.marketamerica.com/blittrean/index.cfm?action=shopping.wpProductNoShop&prodID=13059
Acai is a Berry found in the Amazon that provides a natural supply of energy along with many other benefits. The berry has caught the attention of people like Oprah, calling it one of the most nutritious and powerful foods in the world. http://www.amazonthunder.com/oprah.html
Hope all of this helped